This disclosure relates generally to the field of ITIL®-based (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs). (ITIL is a registered trademark of The Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury acting through The Office of Government Commerce and Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, United Kingdom.) ITIL-based CMDBs are emerging as a prominent technology for Enterprise Management Software. In enterprise systems management, data about IT business entities such as servers and applications are generally spread across several repositories, known as Management Data Repositories (MDRs). This data is made available to software applications through various standard and non-standard mechanisms such as Structured Query Language (SQL) and/or other proprietary programming interfaces.
The usefulness of these CMDBs is dependent on the quality, reliability and security of the data stored in them. A CMDB often contains data about managed resources known as Configuration Items (CIs). ITIL version 3 defines a CI as: “Any Component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service. Information about each CI is recorded in a Configuration Record within the Configuration Management System and is maintained throughout its Lifecycle by Configuration Management. CIs are under the control of Change Management. CIs typically include IT Services, hardware, software, buildings, people, and formal documentation such as Process documentation and [Service Level Agreements].”
The CMDB serves as a point of integration between various IT management processes (See FIG. 1). Data from multiple sources often needs to be managed directly or by reference in commercial CMDBs. Thus, there was a need to create a standard for federating the data from various MDRs and/or CMDBs into a single view that appears seamless and integrated to the end user. This standard, known as the CMDB Federation, or CMDBf, Standard was recently adopted by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as Document Number: DSP0252.
Some of the goals of CMDBf include: enabling a variety of data consumers to access a federation of management data through a standard access interface; enabling a variety of data providers to participate in a federation of management data through a standard provider interface; and providing an approach for reconciling and combining different information about the same resources.
Applications requiring access to distributed management data may utilize one or both of the following methods:    a) Software programmers can write code for a particular application to access each data source through the data sources' supported interfaces and relate the data from different data sources programmatically based on knowledge of the data structures in both data sources.    b) Application developers can use tools provided by generic data integration products/solutions to relate the data from different sources so that applications may access the data through a common interface with two notable limitations: i) Applications which have primarily used CMDB specific interfaces to access management data cause programmers to write or re-write code to use the new interface provided by the integration layer; and ii) The integration layer developers are required to have technical knowledge about the CMDB that many CMDB administrators lack.
What is needed is a method, system and mechanism allowing for dynamic retrieval of data from other MDRs, modeling them as related items and associating them with the core data (e.g., CIs) in a CMDB. This disclosure presents solutions to these and other related problems.